How do I make a text accessible to my students without lowering cognitive demand?
Many teachers wonder how to make a text truly accessible for their CLIL or second-language learners.
If my students cannot access the text, thinking remains out of reach.
Making a text accessible does not mean simplifying it or removing its complexity.
It means enabling my students to enter the meaning of the text so they can think, reason, make connections, and build understanding.
When access to a text is too demanding linguistically, a large part of students’ cognitive energy is spent on decoding, at the expense of comprehension and thinking. The ideas remain out of reach, even when students have the capacity to understand them.
This planner supports you in designing access to meaning before expecting language, particularly in CLIL and multilingual classrooms.
Feel free to share with us:
what resonates most with you,
how you work on text accessibility in your classrooms,
or the questions this raises for you in your teaching.
I look forward to exchanging ideas with you.
